The Virtual Stoa

It is important to have some sense of values today. The theft of an actress’s jewels may make agreeable reading - but there are more pressing problems. The Manchester Guardian follows the golden rule of ‘first things first’.

You would be wrong, however, if you thought that the Manchester Guardian deliberately avoided all that was light in favour of all that was heavy. On the contrary! The Manchester Guardian is well aware of the ludicrous side of life. You may discover with pleasure that this intelligent paper makes the best of both worlds; gay about trifles, serious about serious things.

If a nation gets the rulers it deserves - it certainly gets the newspapers it asks for. Today it is not uncommon for people to deplore the lack of taste in modern journalism - and yet to be taking the very newspaper which (theoretically) offends them. Such people should try the Manchester Guardian.

Those who profess principles should at least seek to exercise them. And to change to the Manchester Guardian means no sacrifice, no giving up of anything. Rather is it a gaining.

A month or two of the Manchester Guardian will cure the taste for anything but good taste. You will come to find that the Manchester Guardian has a charm and a wit of its own. You will come to admire its keen, clean writing and reporting. You will be proud to be seen reading and enjoying a newspaper which contrives always to be good, never to be dull.

During the last few months, some 10,000 readers have changed to the Manchester Guardian. This is agreeable to us, and encouraging. But are we in danger of becoming ‘a successful’ newspaper, with all the failings that this word implies?

We hope not, and we think not. These new readers must take us as they find us. They are intelligent people. They will hardly expect the Manchester Guardian to dance to their tune, or to tremble lest occasionally a point of view conflicts with theirs. The Manchester Guardian is an outspoken newspaper, which takes its mission seriously (although never solemnly!)

A newspaper is an important influence in the life of the regular reader. Let that newspaper, then, be the best that, in this fallible world, fallible men can produce. The Manchester Guardian can make no higher claim than that it does its best to respect the truth, the English language, and the reader. You may find that this is exactly what you want.

Zoran Đinđić, Serbian opposition politician, briefly Prime Minister, student of J�rgen Habermas. Born 1 August 1952, assassinated 12 March 2003.

Over here.

While queuing in Glutton’s to buy beer and pasta at half-time during the Wales-Italy game (and the first Italian try was over the dead ball line), I heard the radio say that Milosevic was the first head of state to be tried for crimes against humanity. At first I thought that wasn’t true, as Admiral Dönitz was tried at Nuremburg, but I see that Wikipedia says specifically that he was put on trial for war crimes and not for crimes against humanity, so perhaps the BBC claim is right.

Even more trivia: are the people in Viking helmets at Lansdowne Road supporters of the Scottish or the Irish? I’d guess they were Scots, but it’s not obvious. At least, not to me. And a prediction: I think the Irish are going to win this one.

Slobodan Milosevic, Prime Minister of Serbia and leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia; born in Po�arevac, 20 August 1941; died in The Hague while on trial for war crimes and genocide, 11 March 2006.

Konstantin Chernenko, General Secretary of the CPSU, 1984-5, born 24 September 1911, died 10 March 1985.

Now that John Profumo has died, are there any members of the wartime House of Commons still alive? I probably should know the answer to this question, but I don’t.

Abram Deborin, Soviet philosopher, born 4/16 January 1881, died 8 March 1963.

We don’t hear much about Tim Collins CBE x-MP in the media much these days, which is a shame as I’d be curious to find out how he’s adjusting to Life After Parliament. But there are still occasional references to be found to his brief, shining political career, this one in today’s Independent on Sunday (boo, boo, you’re supposed to pay for it) making a claim I hadn’t heard before. Here’s Alan Watkins, who makes the familiar point associating sex scandals with Tories and Liberals and money scandals with Labour politicians, and who then goes on:

In the 1990s, true, there was a shift in the terms of trade. The Tories started to go in for both. It was not wholly of John Major’s making. I heard his Back to Basics speech at the party conference and read it several times afterwards. It did not contain a single reference to sexual intercourse, whether expressly or by implication. It was all about reading, writing and arithmetic.The sex bit was inserted by Mr Tim Collins, then the prime minister’s spin merchant, who was asked by journalists whether the speech meant that Mr Major expected the highest personal standards from his ministers. Mr Collins replied that that was indeed what it meant. The trouble started from there.

If that’s true, then Tories must think TC, etc, has a lot to answer for, and the rest of us must thank him for services to the gaiety of the nation.

Sergei Prokofiev, born 27 April 1891, died 5 March 1953.

Josef Stalin, born 21 December 1879, died 5 March 1953.

Over here.

Alright: why is there quite so much interest from the x-RCP crowd in the fight over animal testing that’s going on here in Oxford? I mean, I’m all in favour of building the animal facility, turned up (briefly) at the demonstration last Saturday, and think that the animal rights people who issue death threats and go round setting things on fire should be locked up for a very long time. But when the Mick Hume gang piles in, you begin to wonder whether you’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick.

So: of the seven advertised speakers at the march last week, one was the local MP, Evan Harris, and one was my Magdalen colleague, John Stein, and a third was the 16-year old chap who founded Pro-Test.

All four of the others have got some kind of link with the Extended World of Mick Hume. It’s perfectly possible (likely in some cases, I’d have thought) that these people don’t know that they’re dealing with post-RCP institutions and, basically, following an x-RCP script. But here we go, anyway:

– James Panton (photographed in yesterday’s tehgrauniad) has written for spiked and done quite a bit of work for the Institute of Ideas (esp. for their Battle of Ideas events).

– Kristina Cook has written for spiked on the animals issue, and — surprise, surprise — she thinks that this has got something to do with a “climate of fear“!

– Tipu Aziz has spoken at an Institute of Ideas debate on the topic. And I also see that he’s in today’s graun saying that it’s OK to test cosmetics on animals, which is, I’m afraid, exactly the kind of thing you’d expect the x-RCP mob to be saying.

– Simon Festing is listed as a trustee of Sense about Science, an organisation which SourceWatch reckons orbits in the Mick Hume et al solar system.

And if you want to follow the Pro-Test movement in the mass media, then you can read something by Mick Hume himself on the subject in the Times last week, or this piece by spiked’s Brendan O’Neill (with long quote from Cde Panton) on the protestors over at the BBC, and O’Neill returns to the subject with a page in this week’s New Statesman, asking a classic RCP question, “That Oxford demo: where was the left?”, which concludes - you will be amazed to hear - that “it was hard to resist the conclusion that the anti-testing demo was a reflection of the state of the old left, drowning in cynicism and moral relativism, while the pro-testing demo was new and surprising, an attempt by forward-looking young people to define themselves as progressive and humane. The left has been left behind.” My goodness.

In other x-RCP news, Dave Renton’s been reminiscing about his time in the RCP. And if you need background on just why some of us are pretty suspicious of anything to do with the RCP / Institute of Ideas / spiked-online / LM, et cet. ad naus., then try over here, here, here, or here.

UPDATE [five minutes later]: Oh look, here’s another organisation with all the tell-tale signs of being another x-RCP front, which gives me a few more names to conjure with: Josie Appleton (in spiked), Bill Durodi� (in the THES) and Dolan Cummings (in spiked).

Karl and Fred. More Communists over here [via].

Ian Samson is great fun on the subject of Johnny Cash in this week’s LRB. And this bit made me laugh:

In his autobiography he recalls an incident backstage when June offered to iron his shirt: �I jerked off the shirt and threw it to her. She ironed it, and I went on stage in a nicely pressed shirt. Thus began her lifelong dedication to cleaning me up, and my lifelong acceptance of that mission.� Never mind Lives of the Saints; the esteem and assurance of heaven should surely go to the wives of the saints: the list of angelic long-suffering wives, if not endless, is certainly extensive, and June Carter had a headstart on most of them as she�d already been married twice, and she played autoharp.

Oh, and there’s also this [via, oddly enough]. I wonder if they’ll be any good.

Over here. The protestors seem to think this is a good thing, though there doesn’t seem to be quite enough detail in the reports to be sure about this. Let’s hope so.

This is very good. [via]

One of my friends used to eat puddings only during Lent, on the grounds that he was denying himself the pleasures of self-denial. I don’t know if he still does this, but it seemed to me to be a very good idea.

Ash Wednesday is usually a good time for a commination, so if there’s anyone you especially want to curse, please pop your nominations into the comments, and we’ll see what a jealous, vengeful, righteous and wrathful God can deliver over the coming year.

From today’s Private Eye. Apologies for the crappy photo. The white writing at the bottom says, “WARNING: With a Tessa you can go down as well as up”.